This article cites obesity, diabetes, and other health metrics that do not appear to be adjusted for differences comparing different population's age ranges. The Amish have very large families (6+ children per family) so they have as a percentage fewer old people who have more health issues overall.
The Amish health care system
251–260 of 327 posts
Re: The Amish health care system
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well - first you have absurdly expansive universities required to be a doctor. They can be absurdly expansive because there is an expectation that students will indebt themselves with this one kind of debt you can't default on. So doctors have to earn more to be able to pay it back. Then you have lawsuits where cost of lawsuit is paid by both sides, no matter who is at fault. So if it takes 2 years and costs 100 000…
Thanks. re lawsuits, I advocate a specialized healthcare court for adjudicating those cases. Our current system of legal precedent does not recognize progress of science. So we end up with nonsense like unnecessary c-sections for decades because a jury of laypersons determined vaginal births increases cerebral palsy. https://web.archive.org/web/20090424115607/http://www.nytime... We already have separate specialized…
I never understood how precedent system works, doesn't even have to be about progress of technology. Morality has progress too.
If someone ruled once that Indians aren't people and can be expelled from their property is that still a law? It can't be, right?
Or how about when you legalize something?
Re: The Amish health care system
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's as if the rich assume that things will change for the worse for them if universal health care is enacted. Well, it depends on the implementation, but Bernie Sanders has been on record numerous times as stating that his Medicare-for-All proposal would absolutely ban private insurance. Elizabeth Warren is another Democratic front-runner who indicated that she's on board with that, though her proposals didn't nec…
It's a slight misstatement to say that any of the M4A plans would have "banned private insurance." None of them prohibit supplemental coverage that would be secondary to Medicare.
I didn't say that any of the M4A plans would ban private insurance. That doesn't change the fact that Bernie has stated that his M4A plan would, even where the plan he's put forward doesn't show that.
I think it's fair (if a bit naive) to take politicians at their word on occasion. Moreover, I think it's more than a bit disingenuous to assert that plans that are disallowed by law from competing with Medicare services still being allowed to exist for only elective operations as "not banning them." If I disallowed Netflix from streaming any videos longer than a minute in length, I guess technically I have not banned Netflix, but in practice, I have totally banned Netflix, and that's exactly the scale of disallowance we're discussing here.
Re: The Amish health care system
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
There isn’t a legal requirement to have gone to programming school before one can practice software development. (And a good thing too!) If someone wants to hire someone who can kinda program a little, because they charge less, and are likely able to accomplish the task the person has in mind, then they should be free to do that. (Of course, if the task is one where failure causes a big problem, then one should get s…
> There isn’t a legal requirement to have gone to programming school before one can practice software development. (And a good thing too!) The vast majority of developers cannot kill you if they screw up. In the cases where that isn't true, e.g. software for medical equipment, I'd expect to find some significantly higher hurdles to get past before you can release that software. We don't generally require developers t…
Lots of professions can kill people of they screw up. LOTS. Our society has various ways to deal with this.
Re: The Amish health care system
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that bus drivers have a much larger impact in terms of lives lost if things go wrong, yet they have significantly lower wages and require less training. The same goes for pilots and air traffic controllers.
You can argue that but what’s your point? The current truck driver training system works well enough AFAIK. Do you demand more training?
How is it decided how many regulations are "enough" for a given field? It seems they are on an ever-increasing ratchet mechanism, often driven by mass hysteria.
Re: The Amish health care system
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big difference between the two camps that I see is that one side recognizes the cost benefit of their position and the other side doesn't. Price controls on healthcare (socialization) has positive and negative impacts. The positive impact is universality. Everyone gets approximately the same basic level of care. In some countries you might be able to pay for a nicer room, or quicker service, but generally speakin…
1.) Your theory assumes that the cost difference at the hospital goes toward innovation. It ignores role of public money that goes into research. It is also not analyzing where the money are actually going. 2.) With this theory, if it is true, you are basically volunteering American patients to pay for innovation worldwide. That is quite a bad deal for quite a lot of American people. 3.) > My speculation is that the…
1) No it doesn't
2) America doesn't have to let this happen. We could charge other countries for our innovations or otherwise demand reciprocation.
3) For people rich enough to have serious political power, the short term price difference is negligible or perhaps even cheaper under price controls.
Re: The Amish health care system
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Islam may like a word with you on that one. There it's not just the priests. It's very common for minors to be married off, young boys to be sold as sex slaves (common in the turkic -stans areas although not sure about today), and the "it's only gay if you take it" reasoning I believe in one of the hadith's which condones pedophilia.
Religion was created in order that priests, mullahs, etc. could perpetrate otherwise forbidden sexual acts on defenseless people. Some later offshoots have forgotten this, but Catholicism and Islam remember. What was the ISIS caliphate, if not organized sex crime? It seems the Protestants favor abuse of girls instead of boys, which in their minds is more moral...
However life back then was incredibly different. We can look at it in hindsight and judge it with the morality of today but that's somewhat unfair of how life was. I mean slavery was commonplace, death sentences for most crimes, and not really any "true" justice system.
Although as of today? Yes I totally agree.
Re: The Amish health care system
#258Why does nobody look at the medical profession as the racket it is? You don't need to be an MD to handle %80 of hospital visits, and you can train trades people to handle most emergencies. Insurance companies are awful, but seriously, we can train field medics to do stitches and set bones, why should it cost $3000 to have an MD do it? Listening the hand wringing about it is infuriating when you realize that the reaso…
A sibling of mine is a very highly paid medical specialist. She studied, worked and studied more doing exams into her early thirties. Combined with having to travel a lot to get experience meant she wasn't able to settle till her mid thirties. Prior to that she earned good money but worked insane hours not including study time. I know because I stayed with her sometimes. I work in a pretty stressful job but I couldn'…
The current system restricts the supply of medics and results in overwork, often sleep-deprived stressed people in a rush to make decisions. It would be better to allow more people in who can take more time and consideration of each case.
Re: The Amish health care system
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it's definitely not the insurance companies that extort everyone for outrageous fees under threat of death thus creating most profitable industry in the world, yet producing nothing of value whatsoever who are the problem, it's all the doctors fault.
This. Insurance companies want medical procedures to cost more so that they can charge higher fees and punish those who don’t choose to participate in their industry.
Exactly, it's the same for car insurance where (industry-wide) high repair costs mean the insurance industry has more turnover from which to extract a percentage profit margin. Exactly the same forces apply for medical insurance.
Re: The Amish health care system
#260Why does nobody look at the medical profession as the racket it is? You don't need to be an MD to handle %80 of hospital visits, and you can train trades people to handle most emergencies. Insurance companies are awful, but seriously, we can train field medics to do stitches and set bones, why should it cost $3000 to have an MD do it? Listening the hand wringing about it is infuriating when you realize that the reaso…
I think that there are certainly some issues with an artificial scarcity of doctors as well as overly restrictive regulations requiring MDs for certain procedures that don't require MD training, but the evidence shows that this is not the main driver of high costs. Physician salaries are only about 8% of healthcare spending[1] and according to my own research, only about 20% is due to all healthcare worker salaries (…
There are plenty of ways it could be made cheaper, hugely cheaper, but the regulatory system protects the established players / methods and prevents competition.